PS CS4's "Seam Carving" Feature: Why I'm excited about it

[reg]

First a quote from Webmonkey's first look at the forthcoming Photoshop:

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping new feature is the “seam carving” resize tool. Traditionally, if you want to resize the width of an image, but not the height, you’ve had to accept some distortion as the image was stretched. Last year, however, two researchers came up with a technique known as seam carving, or intelligent resizing. As we suspected when one of the team was hired by Adobe, the technology has become part of Photoshop.
Seam carving is difficult to describe. Basically, the tool looks at an image, determines which areas are of the greatest interest, and then resizes the other areas, leaving the primary areas of visual interest alone. The result is a nearly distortion-free resized image.


The opposite works as well. If a region of an image needs editing — say, a tourist standing in your otherwise pristine scene — you can use the Seam Carving tool to remove the tourist and leave the rest of the scene intact. It’s one of the cooler things we’ve seen Adobe add to recent version of Photoshop. Even just using the beta version, we’ve become addicted.

and a link: http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/First_Look:_Photoshop_Creative_Suite_4_Is_Faster__More_Refined

As I'm sure you all are, I'm personally thrilled about this. I'm looking forward to trying out "insta-panorama" on some basic landscape shots. And I dare say that this feature may replace most typical use of cloning in photo editing.



What say you?

 

[Overread]

now that is interseting - going my feeling here I suppose it detects which areas of the shot are out-of focus (ie softer) and which areas are the key interest of focus (sharper) and then adds the pixels into the softer areas
Their example of removing a tourist sounds very interesting, though I think the clone tool will still be needed (looking at their beach example some areas of the sand appear to need a little work to look real)
Looking at their example on their site - that of the beach - look at the cliffs in the background and you can see the texture is very definatly altered by the method - though its abilty to ignor the surfers is indeed very impressive.

 

[shivaswrath]

and you can upgrade all for $199!! (me thinks that's reasonable. . .)

 

[Bifurcator]

Yeah, Adobe demoed this feature a good 6 months before the release of CS3. I was really surprised when CS3 released without it. I had since written it off as not-to-be-included-ever but it's great to see they are going to include it in CS4! :thumbup:

 

[Josh66]

Yeah, Adobe demoed this feature a good 6 months before the release of CS3. I was really surprised when CS3 released without it. I had since written it off as not-to-be-included-ever but it's great to see they are going to include it in CS4! :thumbup:

I remember seeing a demonstration of it on youtube or something...

It looked pretty damn cool.

 

[JerryPH]

and you can upgrade all for $199!! (me thinks that's reasonable. . .)

I found a CD of CS2 at a garage sale for a couple of dollars, complete with original case, upgraded from CS2 to CS3 for peanuts. Another $199 is reasonable if there are a lot more than 1 new features coming (I am sure there are tons more, finding out what they are is an important factor).

We'll see. For now I still say that I'm good.

 

[Garbz]

I remember seeing a demonstration of it on youtube or something...

It looked pretty damn cool.

Yeah this came out of the depths of a PhD thesis in 06 and was then displayed at a Siggraph the year after I think, and there were some wonderful demonstrations which explained how it all worked.

 

[danjchau]

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